The Doomsday Clock is an internationally recognized design that conveys how close we are to destroying our civilization with dangerous technologies of our own making. First and foremost among these are nuclear weapons, but the dangers include climate-changing technologies, emerging... Read More

The Energy Department appears to have lost track of 96 kilograms of uranium 233, a fissile material made from thorium that can be fashioned into a bomb, and wants to put nearly a ton of left-over fissile materials in a government landfill, in apparent violation of international standards.

The world lived for half a century with the constant specter of nuclear war and its potentially devastating consequences. The end of the Cold War took the potency out of this Armageddon scenario, yet the existential dangers have only multiplied.

Japan's energy policy is now at its most critical juncture since the inception of nuclear power in 1966. Nearly 16 months after the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station -- the world's worst nuclear crisis since Chernobyl -- Japan's nuclear policy has finally started to transform.

"What will make a focus on nuclear security a permanent feature of what we do?" asked Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard at the 2012 Nuclear Security Summit held in Seoul in late March. Experts agree that the 2014 summit must go further in securing nuclear materials from disasters and, most important, terrorist threats -- but agreement on precisely how to do this is harder to come by. In this regard, Australia has much to offer.

Before the Fukushima nuclear disaster, China had a relatively small fleet of 14 nuclear reactor units with a relatively small capacity -- less than 12 gigawatts of electricity -- but the country had big nuclear plans. It led the world in new reactor construction, with 27 units under way, five units approved and awaiting construction, and another 16 units scheduled. If all current construction went forward as planned, the country would be ensured of reaching its original target of 40 gigawatts of nuclear-generated electric capacity by 2020.

The Japanese government recently announced a de facto nationalization of the Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) to avert the prolonged insolvency expected to result from massive compensation claims, cleanup charges, and reactor-disposal costs related to the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station.

After two exhausting days of debate, negotiation, and concession in Reykjavik, Iceland, US President Ronald Reagan and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev had come to a dead end. An improbable agreement for nuclear disarmament was in jeopardy because the delegations quibbled over one word: "laboratory." Could the United States test its Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) -- an embryonic antiballistic missile system known as "Star Wars" -- in space, or should research and development stay grounded?

The catastrophe now referenced by a single word -- Fukushima -- is not merely a major natural disaster. The events of 3/11 sent shockwaves through the nuclear industry and governments around the world and constitute the end of a certain economic development model and the industrial risk calculation that underlies it. Giant, centralized electricity production sites that rain kilowatt-hours onto consumers who are constantly increasing their consumption -- while accepting risk that can potentially harm millions -- are now outdated.

Over the past six months, two geological events in Japan and the United States had similar characteristics but very different outcomes. At Fukushima, 40-plus-year-old reactors shut down as designed on March 11 following a magnitude 9.0 earthquake, but the combination of ruptured offsite power supply lines and generators flooded by the ensuing tsunami led to a massive meltdown.

Who could have imagined a year ago that the ceremonies of the 66th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki would be so poignant? Who could have imagined that Japan would have to endure another disaster derived from the energy source used to kill hundreds of thousands of people in 1945?

Although the Fukushima disaster has stalled the ambitions of some developing countries to deploy new power reactors, the Japanese crisis has not seriously affected the expansion of Iran's nuclear energy program. Among the 45 countries that are actively considering plans to build their first power reactors, Iran is farthest along in the process and claims it will connect its Bushehr nuclear power plant to the national grid and begin producing electricity in August.

The ongoing nuclear power plant disaster in Japan has once again pushed the topic of radiation safety into the public consciousness, while also reminding us that the public continues to doubt government and nuclear industry information on safety and the effects of radiation. Part of this wariness stems from the fact that people cannot detect radiation using their own senses, which creates a dread of the unknown. People are also very aware that the effects of radiation are cumulative and may not appear for many years, so the outcome of a disaster like Fukushima is not easy to predict.

The ongoing Fukushima disaster will inevitably provoke a new examination of the biological effects of radiation from nuclear accidents, and it has already had a major influence on nuclear power initiatives worldwide. At present, the extent and levels of radioactive contamination around the reactor and in the affected Japanese prefectures is unknown, so any predictions of the effects on human and ecological populations would rely on mere speculation. However, our experience with the native fauna exposed to the Chernobyl environment may provide some insights.

In a rare accord reached on March 25, the European Union decided to conduct safety "stress tests" on all of its 143 nuclear reactors. Akin to earlier stress tests that evaluated whether major banks were robust enough to withstand adverse economic conditions in the aftermath of the global financial collapse, the nuclear safety stress tests will assess the ability of reactors to withstand events such as those that devastated Fukushima.

The magnitude 9.0 earthquake that shook northern Japan on March 11, combined with the giant tsunami that followed, is one of the worst natural disasters that any country has had to bear in recent times. As of today, Japan's National Police Agency reports 27,652 people dead or missing. The gravity of the disaster has been matched only by the stoic and disciplined response of the Japanese public to this massive tragedy.